Looking for Chopin and the beauty of his music everywhere - in concert halls, poetry, films, and more. In 2010 we celebrated his 200th birthday with an anthology of 123 poems. Here, we'll follow the music's echoes in the hearts and minds of poets and artists, musicians and listeners... Who knows what we'll find?

Monday, March 24, 2014

(Continued, second part of an abridged version of an article published in Halina Golberg, ed., The Age of Chopin, 2004).

In an essay welcoming the publication of Chopin’s posthumous works in 1856, Józef Kenig (1821-1900) lauded Chopin’s music for its the contribution of the distinct Polish voice to the “concert of the nations.” The composer himself was seen as the founder of the future national school of music, and a musician-poet who may be compared to “an Aeolian harp on which the nation plays, breathing all of its sorrows, all of its delights; at times [he is] the tool of Providence, suitable for moaning only.” The emphasis on sorrowful aspects of the Polish national spirit was politically motivated since it reflected the emotional response to the plight of the nation without a state. Over the course of the century, the definitions of the Polish spirit connected to Chopin’s music acquired an increasingly negative valence, shifting from the domain of nobility, energy and spontaneity, to the melancholy realms of sorrow, longing, and despair. The pivotal text in this regard was Chopin’s biography by Franz Liszt, first published in 1852. Liszt’s book—filled with so many factual errors that, according to a comment by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, its title should be changed to “Fantaisie brillante”—established the trope of żal or żałość [sorrow] as the principal characteristic permeating Chopin’s personality, his music, and Polish identity in general.

Despite the growing acceptance of Liszt’s idea, the focus on the sorrowful aspects of Polish national identity was neither obvious not universal. Kraszewski, for instance, considered the melancholy of Chopin’s music as a reflection of his personal painful history, his lost battle with illness, his exile, homesickness and longing. The nostalgia was Chopin’s own and it did not articulate any traits of the national spirit. In fact, according to Kraszewski, it did the opposite: its presence in the mazurkas destroyed the genre’s identity by diffusing the national charactertistics of a “noble strength and energy.” Similarly to Kraszewski’s, the definition of the “Polish type” (i.e. the exemplary personality of the nation) by Jan Kleczynski included an array of positive features: “warmth, zest, politeness, goodness, boisterousness, compassion, naturalness, generosity, elegance.” The writer claimed that these traits permeated Chopin’s polonaises and mazurkas, thus connecting the “genre” and “spiritual content” criteria of Polish identity (Musical Criteria 2 and 6). In addition to this range of national features noted in reference to Chopin’s works, Kleczyński speculated about the general Slavic traits of Chopin’s musical personality, singling out rzewność [tenderness] as the main Slavic characteristic.

The melancholy spirit returned in other studies; for instance Maurycy Karasowski’s monograph of 1882 emphasized the saturation of Chopin’s music with sorrow and nostalgia, which he described as prime features of Polish Romantic poetry. In 1899, composer Władysław Żeleński defined this sorrowful quality as tęskna nuta [a longing tone] and noticed its paucity among Chopin’s predecessors. To him Chopin was the first to use folklore quotation and stylization (Musical Criteria 3 and 4) as well as find a true Polish character (Musical Criterion 6), because he was neither a foreigner, nor a follower of alien inspirations, remaining instead a true, native son of the Polish soil (Biographic Criteria 2, 3, 4). Thus, the purity of the national expression in Chopin’s music is linked to the purity of Chopin’s personal identity as a Pole—both inherited and consciously cultivated.
Zygmunt Noskowski concurred with the view of his predecessors that Chopin’s works revealed “the distinct mood, representative only of our people.” Citing Liszt as his inspiration, Noskowski proceeded to identify this national mood as żal [sorrow] and pointed out the purposeful and self-defined aspect of the expression of the Polish spirit in Chopin’s music. The predominant sorrowful mood of Chopin’s pieces—though different from pain, longing, pensiveness, or complaint—was an expression of emotional experiences that the composer cultivated and dwelled upon. In this account, the feeling of sorrow was one of the markers of national identity, differentiating true Poles from foreigners. In addition, Noskowski maintained that Chopin personally was a representative of the suffering Polish nation: “his path of life, i.e., his mental and physical suffering, still amplified this sensitivity which necessarily had to be reflected in his works.”

While the presence of sorrow, nostalgia, and melancholy in Chopin’s music was seen in Poland as a manifestation of its purely Polish character, the same traits were construed abroad as expressions of a more general, human quality. It is interesting to note that these Polish (or Slavic) traits of melancholy and over-sensitivity appear as defining features of the most Romantic among the “representative men” described by Hyppolyte Taine, in his Philosophy of Art. Taine envisioned the modern man of the 19th century as being primarily melancholic and considered melancholy to be the main characteristics of the whole period. The “representative man” of the late 19th century was, according to Taine, “the melancholy insatiable Faust or Werther,” who “entertains a horror of cheerful music” and who “will enjoy only the music of Chopin and the poetry of Lamartine or Heine.” According to Taine’s theory, all the arts of a given time embody or portray the main characteristics of their period; sorrow—the emotion of the times—was also the hallmark of the Romantic arts in general. Perhaps for this reason, sorrowful Poland, a nation languishing without sovereignty throughout the century, became such a cause celebré in Romantic Europe: it was a paradigmatic national example of the main personality feature permeating the whole European culture.

“Racial” Nationhood and Art According to Taine

Taine’s thinking about the representative man of the times seems to diffuse the clarity of arguments presenting melancholy as an exclusively Polish or Slavic trait. In contrast, his ideas about inherited national character, based on the notion of ethnicity-as-race, have shaped the conceptual frameworks of art history and aesthetics. His books were translated into many languages and repeatedly reprinted in Europe and North America during the 1870s – 1910s; his theories also reached Poland. Taine’s philosophy emphasizes the primordial unity of ethnic groups, shaped by their genetic kinship, their natural environment, and their location in historical time. The culture of different nations, e.g. ancient Greeks or 17th-century Dutchmen, was supposed to be predetermined by their inherent, genetic characteristics, historical milieu, and the climate and geographic features of their countries. The three interrelated sources of identity included racial background, natural environment, and cultural experiences accumulated over the centuries. Inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Taine proposed a kind of environmental determinism based on the notion of the essential character of a country, from which “spring an infinity of peculiarities, summing up the entire nature of the country, not only its physical outlines, what it is in itself, but again the intellectual, moral and physical qualities of its inhabitants, and of their works.

For instance, the essential character of the Netherlands was that of “alluvial plains” and the abundance of agricultural produce made available by the rich soil resulted in the affluence of human life that found its most perfect expression in the paintings of Rubens. Similarly, ancient Greeks made art that possessed a certain quality because they were all “men of the same race, the same education, the same language . . . a remarkably handsome, intelligent race, viewing life in quite a new way.”
In addition to these three general characteristics, defining the whole culture of a given nation, Taine discussed the factors that influence an individual artwork that should be never seen in isolation, but always in its proper context. These factors formed three aggregates: of the artist’s own works, the ideas of his colleagues, and the context of the contemporaneous world. This conceptual background surrounds each work of art with a unique aura and predetermines the artistic modes of expression. Simultaneously, it needs to be purposefully addressed and presented.

The main task of the artist, according to Taine, is to capture and portray the essential character of an object or country. In this activity, however, the artist is constrained by the particular manifestations of the national character. Therefore, “the social medium, that is to say, the general state of mind and manners, determines the species of works of art in suffering only those which are in harmony with it, and in suppressing other species, through a series of obstacles interposed, and a series of attacks renewed, at every step of their development.”
Taine’s speculations about the origins of aesthetic traits of a national art in that nation’s racial heritage and geographic-climactic conditions were not questioned by Polish writers who embraced his holistic and simplistic explanations of national identity and extended his ideas into the domain of music.

In the first half of the 20th century, Taine’s racial terminology, so jarring today, was used without remorse or apology by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Karol Szymanowski, Stanisław Niewiadomski, Piotr Rytel, and Mieczysław Gliński. Szymanowski’s search for “the deepest and most essential aspect of Polish soul, national soul, or the depth of the race” discussed in the closing segment of this chapter indicates an awareness of Taine’s ideas of the essential character of a nation, based on inborn “racial” characteristics that distinguish one nation from another. The presence of racial terminology in musical studies from the first half of the 20th century discussed in the remainder of this article highlights a disquieting connection of music aesthetics to the most extreme form of racial nationalism. While the intentions of Polish composers turning to race in their nationalist project could be described as noble, rather than criminal (as had been Hitler’s), the results had harmful ramifications for the definitions of national identity and acceptance of ethnic minorities within the Polish nation.

In the process of asserting Chopin’s Polish identity at the beginning of the 20th century, an awareness of his double cultural and personal background was replaced by a belief in his fully Polish origins. This transformation may be perceived with the greatest clarity in two texts about Chopin by a fin-de-siecle writer, known for his charismatic personality, Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868-1927).

Przybyszewski’s first study of Chopin and Nietzsche (1892) placed the composer half-way between Polish and French cultures, emphasizing the presence of both heritages in his personality and musical output. In this text, Przybyszewski considered Chopin as an exemplar of a Nietzschean super-hero and described the composer’s personality as “a product of an crossing of two races and two cultures—Slavic and Gallic.” According to Przybyszewski’s interpretation of Chopin’s psychosomatic and emotional identities (Biographic Criteria 3, 4) the composer’s Slavic features included: a delicacy of feeling, refinement, inclination to alternate between the extremes of contrasting emotional states, melancholy, and “a sublimated egotism” that reduces all experiences to a focus on oneself. Gallic traits in Chopin’s personality included a certain light-mindedness, seductiveness and feminine characteristics, as well as a joy of life and the emphasis on reason. Already in this text, however, Przybyszewski gave a priority to Chopin’s Polish heritage and claimed that the composer’s personality revealed a predominance of a “Slavic inclination to morbidity.”

In order to transform Chopin into an unambiguously national composer his background had to be rewritten and the Latin element removed. Chopin’s music could fully epitomize the Polish nation if he were completely a part of it in his body and soul. This transformation took place in Przybyszewski’s second essay on the subject, Chopin and Nation (1910). Here, Przybyszewski returned to the theory of one predominant characteristic of the national spirit introduced by Taine and applied to Polish music by Żeleński and Noskowski (Musical Criterion 6: spiritual content). This tone, “the most primal unit in the makeup of the soul. . . colors all the feelings, impressions, experiences, with all of his characteristics.” In accordance with Taine’s thesis about the three defining factors of national identity in art and the significance of geographic milieu for the structuring of national traits, Przybyszewski maintained that the Polish soul was united with the native landscape of Mazowsze: “broad plains” filled with the “blossoming rye” and the mournful sounds of “the wind wailing in the bare steppe.” For the writer, the Polish spirit was suffused by “the tone of insufferable despair” and “filled with curses and mutiny.” Since there are no steppes in the densely populated Mazovia, Przybyszewski’s description would have been more appropriate for the barren Russian landscape. Similarly, the endless despair and darkness of Przybyszewski’s typical Pole better suits the stereotypes of the nostalgic Russian soul, not the Polish one. While emphasizing the melancholic morbidity of Chopin personality (Biographic Criteria 3 and 4: psychosomatic and emotional identities), Przybyszewski describes a dire, soulful landscape that finds a perfect musical expression in Chopin’s music (Musical Criteria 5 and 6: content and spiritual content).

The transformation of Chopin into an “all-Polish” composer and a national symbol in person required the Polonization of his whole family. This step was taken in a legend about Chopin’s French forefathers as actually being Polish, introduced by Oskar Kolberg and reported by Marceli Szulc (1873), Maurycy Karasowski (1882), and Ferdinand Hoesick (1904), as well as Jaroslaw de Zielinski in 1902. Zelinski was commissioned by Ignacy Jan Paderewski to write an article on “The Poles in Music” for The Century Library of Music, edited by the Polish pianist. The “Chopin” section of Zielinski’s study is dedicated in its entirety to proving that Chopin, indeed, was an all-Polish composer (Biographic Criterion 2: family-of-origin). Here, instead of summarizing the nature of Chopin’s contribution to Polish music—the topic of entries on all the remaining composers—Zielinski cites a fictitious genealogy provided by Oskar Kolberg and meant to dispel any doubts that Chopin was a real Pole. According to this account, Chopin’s French forefathers included the descendants of courtiers of the Polish king Stanisław Leszczyński, who left Poland after a reign of five years (1704-1709) and settled in the duchy of Lorraine, France. Apparently, Leszczyński’s courtiers included two “natives of Kalisz, Jean Kowalski and Nicholas Szop” whoc changed the names to “Ferrand and Chopin” and settled at Nancy in Lorraine. Nicholas’s son, Jean Jacques, marrie a widow Desmarets (or Desmarais) and became a teacher; of their four children the youngest, Nicholas, moved back to Poland to become the father of Frédéric.

In the article, Zielinski described a set of musical characteristics that he defined as typically Polish, or “characteristic of the Slavonic type” and including: the common occurrence of “forbidden progressions of intervals, such as augmented seconds, diminished thirds, augmented fourths, diminished sevenths, minor ninths, etc.,” harmony with “successions of chords presenting no logical contradiction, and yet at variance with established usage,” melodic features “exactly the reverse of that practised in other lands” and a general trait of “a freedom of form and variety of rhythm exclusively Slavonic and particularly Polish.” The rationale for this creative freedom stemmed from personality characteristics, as Zielinski claimed “the temperament of the Slav does not tolerate oppression nor even constraint.” It would be impossible to locate a profusion of harmonic means listed by Zielinski in the national operas by Karol Kurpiński, Józef Elsner, or Stanisław Moniuszko. In fact, of the Romantic composers, only Chopin fits the pattern of “freedom of form” and harmony filled with “forbidden progressions’”—his unique approach to chromaticism and harmony has often been commented upon, for instance by Ludwik Bronarski and Maciej Gołąb.

Thus, it appears that Zielinski derived his list of Polish musical characteristics from the oeuvre of one composer who—due to his French family background—was not even fully Polish. The fanciful Polish genealogy of Chopin’s family was meant to solve that problem.
A focus on Chopin’s whole oeuvre as a repository of the “Polish spirit” and on Chopin himself as an ideal Pole, permeates texts by pianist-composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941), especially his speech on the occasion of 100th anniversary of Chopin’s birth, given in 1910 during a festival in Lviv (then known as Lemberg) and published in English translation in 1911 as Chopin: A Discourse. The speech articulates the existence of a strong link between the country, the “Polish race” and Chopin’s art. Paderewski envisions Chopin’s music as a true expression of the Polish spirit (Musical Criterion 6), claiming that in his works one may hear “the voice of every generation, the voice of a whole race, and the voice of the very earth which brought them forth.” This statement directly reflects the three criteria of musical identity provided by Taine: race, history, and milieu. Paderewski’s text features other, well-known Romantic interpretative tropes, as it associates Chopin’s music with the evocations of the heroic, mythical past and the images of Polish nobility (some of these associations have been mentioned earlier). Moreover, Chopin’s music is supposedly filled with a pastoral imagery of the Polish fields, forests, rivers; it depicts a peaceful landscape, sorrowful in the fall, joyous in the spring, a musical countryside that is permeated by the sounds of folk music and Nature (Musical Criteria 3-5: quotation, style, content). In contrast to Przybyszewski’s preoccupation with bleak landscapes as signs of Polish despair and morbidity (and similarly to Noskowski’s idyllic vision), Paderewski portrays Chopin’s works as evocations of Poland’s idealized past, replete with festive celebrations and pastoral scenery.

This music, tender and tempestuous, tranquil and passionate, heart-reaching, potent, overwhelming: this music which eludes metrical discipline, rejects the fetters of rhythmic rule, and refuses submission to the metronome as if it were the yoke of some hated government: this music bids us hear, know, and realise that our nation, our land, the whole of Poland, lives, feels, and moves, “in Tempo Rubato.”

Paderewski’s claim about Polishness of Chopin’s music was supported by detailed claims of a full congruence between the “national spirit” and the stylistic and spiritual properties of Chopin’s music (Musical Criterion 6: spiritual content). He also used an argument based on Musical Criterion 7 (performance context): Chopin’s music is all-Polish because his Polish listener understands it as such, “he understands all, feels all, because it is all his, all Polish...” A Polish listener hears in Chopin’s music “the voice of his whole race,” because Chopin himself, “by the grace of God, was spokesman of the Polish race.” Nonetheless, for Paderewski “Polish” was not equivalent to “Catholic.” In contrast to writers who wished to inseparably connect the Polish spirit and imagery of Chopin’s music to Catholicism (see Noskowski above), Paderewski referred to a variety of Slavic, pagan deities evoked in Chopin’s works: “the wild frolics of demi-god and goddess” in the Scherzos, the “deathless song” of the Queen of Love, Dziedzila and the thunderous voice of the mighty Perun in fast, dramatic movements.

Similarly to de Zielinski who struggled to exclude the Russian “Muscovite” from the Slavic family of nations, Paderewski contrasted the Polish spirit of Chopin (“his grace and charm, his wealth of colour, of lights and shades”) with the “somber and monotonous although clever Russian muse” which reflected the “withering despair which blows towards us as a blast frost-laden, across steppes immeasurable, boundless, hopeless…” It is interesting to note that, for Paderewski’s contemporary Przybyszewski, such boundless despair and steppes were the hallmarks of Chopin’s Polish identity. In constructing this image, Przybyszewski accepted negative German stereotyping of Poles-as-Slavs that Paderewski rejected.

Paderewski’s concept of the “Polish race” was not elucidated in any more detail in other texts. Nonetheless, the scope of his ideas of Polish nationhood may be gleaned from his speeches given during a campaign for Poland’s independence that he undertook during the World War I, touring the U.S. with Chopin recitals and patriotic appeals. The composer sought to recreate Poland as a great, multinational country, modeled upon the U.S. and called “The United States of Poland.” The homeland that Paderewski wanted to resurrect would guarantee freedoms to all its inhabitants; his conception of Polish statehood was not based on racial exclusivity and hatred. Yet, the invocations to the Polish race and the mysterious, timeless national spirit that permeate Paderewski’s Chopin lecture were absent from his speeches and appeals directed at non-Polish audiences in America. Thus it seems clear that the narrowly nationalist rhetoric of Chopin and the “Polish race” could only be accepted by those preoccupied with ethnically exclusive definitions of Polish identity.

The tone of narratives about Chopin’s Polishness changed after the country regained its independence. The emphasis on the all-encompassing expression of sorrow disappeared and so did the focus on the musical evocations of the Polish land. Of prime importance in the new country was the independence of spirit, heroism, creativity and strength of character of its citizens. During the inter-war period Stanisław Niewiadomski and Karol Szymanowski provided new interpretations of Chopin’s relationship to the “Polish race.” The review of their ideas will bring this study to the brink of World War II and the demise of the notion of “Polish race” that created room for modern concepts of Polish identity and Chopin’s relationship to it.
(.... to be continued)

__________________________

This text is an abridged version of a chapter in Halina Goldberg, ed. The Age of Chopin (Indiana University Press, 2004).

Sunday, March 16, 2014

The focus of Chopin’s followers and
devotees in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rested on his
usefulness for their causes, not on a full understanding of his musical
achievements.Thus, Fryderyk Chopin held
an elevated position in the national pantheon as a poet-prophet [wieszcz]
whose musical statements equaled in significance the poetic proclamations of
Adam Mickiewicz, expressing the true spirit of the nation.Jan Kleczyński (1837-1895), Zygmunt Noskowski
(1846-1909), Władysław Żeleński (1837-1921), Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868-1927),
Jarosław de Zielinski (1847-1922), Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941), Stanisław
Niewiadomski (1859-1936), and Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) were preoccupied
with demonstrating the ways that identified Chopin and his oeuvre as truly and
fully Polish.Their essays contributed to a Polish
tradition of constructing Chopin’s identity, a tradition that evolved through
distinct stages of Polonizing the composer, based on shifting definitions of
the essence of nationality.

In this essay I will trace the
evolution of nationalist views of Chopin’s musical and personal Polishness,
views of an increasingly all-embracing nature, connected to the Romantic idea
of the “Polish spirit” (primarily expressed in Chopin’s music) and to the
notion of the “Polish race” (exemplified by Chopin himself).The conceptual background for this evolution
is provided by ideas put forward by such European writers on nationhood and the
arts as a German Romantic philosopher and critic, Johann Gottfried Herder
(1744-1803), whose well-known idea of the “spirit of the people” i.e. Volksgeist,
influenced the texts by Kleczyński, Noskowski and Żeleński; and a French
philosopher and historian of social-Darwinist orientation, Hippolyte Taine
(1828-1893), whose theories of artistic expressions of the nation-race had an
impact on writings by Przybyszewski, Niewiadomski, Zielinski, Paderewski, and
Szymanowski.The gradual replacement of
the older German notion of the “national spirit” (Herder) with the more modern
notion of the “national race and milieu” (Taine) is evident in the
argumentation used in texts about Chopin’s place in Polish musical culture
until the outbreak of World War II.

Defining National
Traits

In the
process of depicting Chopin as Poland’s paradigmatic national composer, his
followers expressed their beliefs about national messages that Chopin
supposedly conveyed in his music.
Initially, their definitions of national identity, inspired by Herder’s
notion of the Volksgeist, envisioned it as a spiritual phenomenon,
centered on the experiences and productions of the Folk, i.e. the inhabitants
of the countryside enjoying spontaneously creative lives in a close connection
to nature, the pristine and enchanting fields and meadows of Poland. In this interpretative tradition, Chopin’s
music was valued not in and of itself; instead, its quality was construed as
stemming from its closeness to Polish folk song and the landscape. The Chopin essays, however, feature a wider
variety of arguments while explaining the composer’s Polish identity and his
significance for Polish culture. It will
be informative to briefly review the main criteria, or markers, for
ethnic/national identity that recur in Polish writings addressing the national
identity of Chopin and other composers and might be relevant to our discussion.

Selected Criteria for Defining the Polish
Identity of Composers

A. Biographic Criteria

(personal identity,

background, and choices, defined by self and others)

1) “name” – Polish
forms of the first and last name

2) “family-of-origin” – Polish family background,
typically patrilineal and at times connected to the notion of the “Polish
race”

3) “psychosomatic identity” – being the embodiment of
Polish traits in the whole person, body and spirit (given, not self-defined)

4) “emotional and patriotic identity” – having a “Polish
heart” and displaying a deep attachment to Poland (chosen, self-defined)

5) “official identity” – with a Polish national identity
and citizenship

6) “native language” – using Polish as the native language

7) “community” –
engaged in the Polish community, through the place of residence, membership
in organizations, and charitable activities for Polish causes

Both
categories of this list include issues that composers have a degree of control
over by consciously choosing to be Polish and compose Polish music filled with
national traits. Simultaneously, the
list of biographic criteria includes characteristics that pre-date the
composers’ birth and pre-define their identity as Poles in ways transcending
the intentions of the composers’ themselves.
Furthermore, the composers’ lives and music may be depicted as far more
Polish than those originally intended, especially when viewed from a posthumous
perspective of “late grandchildren” who have the freedom of interpreting the composers’ biographical background and
achievements without taking into account their wishes. This openness to fanciful and arbitrary interpretations
characterizes particularly the criteria of family-of-origin, psychosomatic
identity and community in the area of biography, and the criteria of style,
community, content, and spiritual content in the domain of music.

The essays
about Chopin have provided partial and contradictory answers to the following
questions: Was Chopin a Polish composer?
Was Chopin a purely Polish composer, without a trace of French
identity? Was Chopin’s music entirely
Polish and if so, why? What Polish
traits did Chopin capture and express?
What is the definition of being Polish in music? Numerous thematic threads have been
intertwined in these texts that could be given a collective subtitle of “How
Polish was Chopin?” On the basis of scattered references in Chopin’s letters we
might note that the composer’s self-definition during his years in Paris was as
an exiled Pole. Moreover, Chopin seemed to believe in
distinct national emotional and personality traits, pointing to the essential
character differences separating a Slav from a Scandinavian or a Spaniard.

Yet, Chopin’s personal beliefs in this matter
were immaterial for the authors of texts about him, texts that straddle the
areas of music aesthetics, music biography and national ideology. These narratives follow a twisted path
through the list of criteria: the issue of Polonizing Chopin’s name came to the
forefront of discussions in the 1930s (though it was initiated at the end of
the 19th century; see the comments on Niewiadomski’s essays), while the
awareness of the presence of a vaguely defined “Polish spirit” in Chopin’s
music permeated the literature of this subject from its inception (see my
comments about essays by Przybyszewski, Noskowski, and Paderewski, and chapter
10 in this collection). Relying on the
criteria described above to provide a general framework for conceptualizing the
Polishness of Chopin’s music, I will follow a roughly chronological
trajectory. This approach will allow me
to highlight the appearance of significant concepts and interpretations, in
particular, the charged notion of the “Polish race.”

The Rise and Fall of the “Polish Race”

The
tendency to circumscribe the national identity to common genetic origin and
shared personality traits and define art as an expression of such narrowly
described features increased in the Western world towards the end of the 19th
century. Europeans and Americans
habitually described spiritual essences of their nations in terms of their
shared genetic heritage. Such
descriptions permeate the aesthetic writings of Hyppolyte Taine which greatly
influenced generations of Polish music critics and historians. The concept of race itself was developed much
earlier in Germany (by Johan Blumenbach, 1752-1840) and France (by Joseph
Arthur de Gobineau, 1816-1862). From its inception, it served to provide
arguments about the supposed inequality of the world’s peoples and the
superiority of Europeans, or, in particular, the French or the Germans. Different genealogies were compiled for
various national races and their hierarchies reflected the nationalistic and
political views of the writers.

The term
“Polish race” referred to people of inherited Polish ethnicity, i.e. those who
were born to Polish parents, who, in turn, were children of Polish parents,
etc. The chain of origin extended
indefinitely back in time to the nation’s mythical birth from several Slavonic
tribes who “dwelt from time immemorial” on the vast plain “between the Baltic
sea and the Carpathian mountains.” One could be Polish only when sharing the
Polish genes; this heritage was thought to engender common psychological and
spiritual traits of the Polish nation.
These racial definitions of Polishness were found in self-definitions
proclaimed in Poland and abroad, as well as in descriptions offered by
outsiders. Jakob Riis saw “the thrifty Polish race”
(1890) among impoverished emigrants to America; James W. Gerard mused about the
great future of “the splendid Polish race” in its own, independent country
(1918).

A fascinating genealogy of the “Slavic or
Slavonic race” precedes an account of musical achievements of the “Polish race”
in a 1902 essay by an émigré composer and pianist, Jaroslaw de Zielinski
(1847-1922).The Slavic race includes Poles, Czechs,
Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Servians, Croatians, Carinthians, Illyrians, and
Vends, but excludes the “Muscovites,” who claim to be Great Russians
but—according to Zielinski—in reality are a Tartar race.In this narrative, the Slavs’ history unfolds
as a struggle against their neighbors in the south—Byzantine, and the
west—Germanic.The Germans, in addition
to frequent military confrontations, crowded Poland as craftsmen, merchants,
and teachers, thus having the opportunity to wreak havoc with national identity
by prejudicing “their pupils against the Polish language.”The theory that Poland had two enemies,
Russians and Germans, stemming from the historical facts of Poland’s partitions
by Russia, Prussia and Austria at the end of the 18th-century, is
given here a racial justification.Similarly to Zielinski, Charles Phillips (1923) rhapsodized about the
perennial “racial competition”—based on the principle of the “survival of the
fittest”—between the races of the German (i.e. Teuton who was “steady,
powerful, ponderous, self-righteous, self-satisfied, static”) and the Pole
(“dynamic, flexible, un-self-satisfied, self-critical, idealistic and tenacious
of his ideal”).

The notion of the “Polish race”
appeared in various Polish-American writings; for instance in the amended 1914
Charter of a para-military youth association, The Polish Falcons of America
whose main objective was “to regenerate the Polish race in body and spirit and
create of the immigrant a National asset, for the purpose of exerting every
possible influence towards attaining political independence of the fatherland.”While the unabashed patriotism of the Polish
Falcons seems praiseworthy, their goal of renewing and unifying the nation
through strengthening its youth resembles the objectives of totalitarian
organizations in various (actual or imagined) political systems, from Plato's
Republic to Nazi Germany.In this
context, it is important to note that the concept of the “Polish race” found
its demise at the outset of World War II, when the hard-won sovereignty of
Poland was again under attack from Germany seeking to expand its
territories.On August 22, 1939, a week
before the invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II, Hitler
addressed his military commanders ordering them “to kill without pity or mercy
all men, women, and children of Polish race or language.”Therefore, the term acquired a genocidal
connotation which rendered the notion of the “Polish race” unacceptable,
banishing it from respectable nation-building discourse.

Before it disappeared, though, the “Polish race” played an
increasingly more prominent role in constructing the Polish identity of Chopin
and his music. In 1923 Charles Phillips
ended his list of positive characteristics of the “dynamic and idealistic”
Pole: “Chopin is an example.” Let us begin the examination of this topic
with a review of national traits associated with Chopin’s music.

Musical Evocations of Polish History and Landscape

The quest
for Polish subjects in Chopin’s solo piano works (Musical Criterion 5: content)
is a recurring topos in 19th-century responses to his
music. Romantic writers provided
fantastic descriptions of historical subjects hidden in purely instrumental
compositions. For instance, Marceli
Antoni Szulc envisioned the Polonaise Op. 53 in A-flat major as an image of a
national procession of hetmans and voivodas, colorfully costumed in precious
garb of Polish 17th-century noblemen (see also Kleczyński’s
interpretation of this piece in chapter 10). Writing in this vein, Stanisław Tarnowski
(1837-1871) sought a connection between Chopin’s compositions and Polish
poetry. Not surprisingly, he found a
direct patriotic inspiration in numerous pieces, including the Preludes Op. 24,
many Mazurkas, and the Funeral March from the Sonata in B-flat minor. Tarnowski saw the latter work as a “funereal
conduct of the whole nation watching its own funeral.”

A similar
patriotic vision is captured on a late 19th-century postcard depicting pianist
Ignacy Jan Paderewski—a foremost Chopin interpreter of his time (see Figure
1). Here, a solemn procession of Polish
kings and noblemen arises above bluish light emanating from the keyboard;
Paderewski’s outstretched hands and intensely focused face indicate that these
great heroes of the past have been brought to life by his music. This image reveals the role that music played
in the cultivation of Polish culture and identity after Poland’s loss of
sovereignty. The postcard also
illustrates a statement from Ignacy Jan Paderewski’s famous speech of 1910 that
Chopin’s compositions truly contain “the spirit of the land of his fathers, the
spirit of his nation." Paderewski thus described a ghost-filled
scene evoked by Chopin’s music: “Finally . . . spectres fulfill their shadowy
rights. What ghost was that? Whose
spirit there went past? Was this Żółkiewski? Or Czarniecki’s noble shade?”

While the
Polish character of Polish dance genres, such as mazurkas and polonaises, could
not be doubted (Musical Criterion 2: genre), these works themselves have been
taken to a second level of Polishness by being read as programmatic
representations of Polish landscape and village scenes (Musical Criterion 5:
content). Fifty years after the
composer’s death, Zygmunt Noskowski took for granted a thesis that “Chopin’s
melodies are poetic transformations of the sights that the master absorbed in
his youth . . . From many a mazurka one can guess the color and light filling a
landscape that the master saw with the eyes of his soul while writing his
beautiful poem.” Noskowski proceeded to associate particular
images with individual mazurkas, impromptus, sonatas, and ballades. The Impromptu in F-sharp Major was assigned
the most elaborate program. Noskowski
interpreted this work as an extended “Sunday-in-a-village” scene, replete with
“the voices of church bells calling to the service” over summer fields “covered
with newly ripened wheat, gently swaying under a slight breeze.” The commentator concluded: “Nature in its
entirety is praying in this moment... and the holiday sentiment pervades
everything.” Thus, in Noskowski’s
nationalistic/religious interpretation of Chopin’s piano compositions, a
pastoral idyll arises from the music that perfectly captures the serenity of a
people united with their land. The music
is important—and Polish—because it portrays the landscape of Poland and the
religious moods associated with it.

The
language of description used by Polish composers and music critics in the 19th
and early 20th centuries often employs figures of speech equating folk song
with field flowers. The trope that
Chopin’s folk-inspired music is, as it were, permeated with “the fragrances of
delicate flowers of Polish meadows” first appears in Józef Sikorski’s article
of 1849. Sikorski discussed the national traits of
Chopin music (seen in the use of genre, style and quotation; Musical Criteria
2-4) and his inspiration with Polish folk songs. For Sikorski, these songs were elevated,
charming and simple, while remaining as fleeting and ineffable as the “fragrance
of a violet.” This synaesthetic reference
articulates a widespread belief that folk music belonged to the utopia of
cultivated nature, the idyllic and serene “national garden of Eden.”

Similarly, Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821-1883),
characterized Chopin (“a Varsovian by birth, a Pole by heart, and a citizen of
the world by talent”) as someone who “knew how to gather field flowers, without
shaking off even a slightest drop of dew, or a smallest speck of dust from
them.” Norwid’s reference to folksong as “field flowers”
articulates the connection between the beauty of Polish countryside and the
music created by its inhabitants. The
association of Chopin with the lost paradise of the native country recurred in
an essay by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (1812-1887) where Chopin himself (not just
his music, but the whole person) became a “phenomenon, as it were, straight
from our fields and meadows, those of old, those that blessed our evenings with
a marvelous fragrance of the breath of our beloved soil.” Zygmunt Noskowski also penned a noteworthy
passage equating folksong with field flowers and describing Chopin as someone
who “brought a breeze of fresh air” to the “atmosphere of exotic fragrances” of
the Romantic salon. The freshness and originality of Chopin’s
music stemmed from his closeness to Nature, “his first mistress [whose]
brilliance and beauty entranced him and left their traces deep in the soul.” Finding inspiration in folk music, like
painting landscapes outdoors, meant choosing the natural over the artificial.

Folk art as
nature might be an environmental trope, rather than a national one, however in
the Polish context it has strong nationalistic overtones. Through the 19th century Poles were a nation
without sovereignty over its territory, a nation reduced to the status of an
ethnic minority in three different countries.
Since they lived under a constant threat from the occupying nations and
struggled to regain ownership and control of their land (the Prussians being
particularly eager to remove Poles from their farms and/or Germanize them),
their attachment to the ancestral land was an expression of their
patriotism. These difficult circumstances
engendered the myth-making process that transformed Chopin into “a singer of
Polish fields and meadows” praised by Noskowski for the accuracy and
authenticity of his musical landscape depictions. The ecological nationalism of most
“flower”-references reveals a dependency on Herder-sanctioned connection of a
people to the land they inhabit. In this
style of nationalistic readings of Chopin’s music, both Polish folk song and
Chopin’s music based on it have a straightforward link to the benevolent and nurturing
Nature.

In other
nationalistic interpretations, the same music may be seen as vehicle for
conveying the national spirit and expressing the traits of the nation’s
personality (Musical Criterion 6).
Arguments used in this area increasingly take Chopin’s personal
characteristics and heritage into account (Biographic Criteria 2-4, pertaining
to the family of origin, psychosomatic identity, and emotional identity of the
composer). Thus, through the 19th
century, nationalistic writers gradually shift their attention from generalized
and colorful rhapsodizing about the Polish content of Chopin’s music (Musical
Criteria 5-6) toward statements about his personal relationship to the “Polish
race” and its musical manifestations.
Let us first examine the varieties of musical expressions of the Polish
spirit.

Chopin with Cherries

About Me

As an author of seven scholarly books and hundreds of articles and book chapters, I'm well established in the music history world, with two main specializations: Polish music of the 19th and 20th centuries, and 20th-century contemporary music. A former Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga and current member of Village Poets and the Westside Women Writers, I published over 300 poems in various journals and anthologies. I also wrote five collections of poems and edited two poetry anthologies. A Board Secretary and Communications Director of the Polish American Historical Association, I also belong to the American Musicological Society, and the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences. As President of Moonrise Press, I published 16 books of poetry and music history. I received fellowships and awards from the Canadian government, Polish government, USC, PAHA, the City and County of Los Angeles, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Most recently, I received PAHA's 2016 Creative Arts Prize for my two books of poems inspired by WWII experiences of Polish civilians and children.